Automatically post to Facebook from PHP script

Facebook is currently on of the most important publishing and traffic
generating sources for many websites. Manually Cross publishing content
on your own site and Facebook seems like a lot of extra work.

This post guides you through the creation of a Facebook application
that can automatically post messages and other types of content on your
Facebook wall.

Getting started

Building a php script that automatically posts status updates on your wall requires the following steps:

Register a facebook app

To register a Facebook App you need to provide: Site name, Site url (with ending “/”) and the locality of your application.

If everything is OK, you get to a registration conformation screen,
where you get the two important informations: App ID and App Secret that
you need in the next steps.

Give the application the rights to access your wall

Next step is to build a small script that only has one purpose,
identify itself with the new App ID and App Secret to your Facebook
account, so you can allow it to directly communicate with your Facebook
page.

If you skip this step, you need to manually allow the script to
access your Facebook account each time it’s trying to post something,
which isn’t that smart…

Simply insert your App ID and App Secret in this script below and save the script as “fb_access.php” or something similar.

Next step is to upload the script to the same directory on your
server where you uploaded the “facebook.php” class. In this example
we’ll call the script “fb_access.php”

Finally you need to upload the script to your server, and access the
script from your web browser: http://<yoursite>/fb/fb_access.php.

Click the allow button, and you’re ready to build a script that posts to Facebook.

Depending on your Facebook configuration you might get an error message when accessing fb_access.php in your browser.

This typically means that you need to provide a url to the website
connected in the application. Simply click the link “application
settings editor” and provide: Site URL in the “Web site” tab, and try to
load the fb_access.php file again in your browser.

Build the Post to Facebook script

Now that your application has access to your Facebook account, and we
have the general facebook.php class, it’s very easy to build a small
script that can post messages to your Facebook wall.

And that’s it. Try to access the script from your browser and check if a post is added to your Facebook wall.

Please notice that if you controls multiple Facebook pages, this
script will post to the wall of your personal profile. If you want to
post to a specific page, you need to replace “/me/” with the ID of the
specific page.

Another important information is, that you will get an error message
if you try to post the same message twice. So remember to change the
message, when you’re testing the script.

Next steps

This post guides you through the initial Facebook application
registration, and basic script for automatically posting content to a
Facebook wall.

Next step could be to integrate this script in your CMS system, so a
new post is automatically added to Facebook every time you’re updating
the content on your site.

This script is very basic and only adds a status message in plain
text. However you can naturally also post images, links, and other
informations. You can see more about the additional informations you can
include here.